The well-known, idiosyncratic film critic Elias Fragoulis suggested that Dogtooth makes a “comment on running away and isolation.” Nikos Danikas, another respected critic, related the film to the “theater of the absurd, black comedy, contemporary tragedy and the ridiculousness of today’s society.”

Taken together, these comments suggest that the basic themes underlying the movie regard the fragmentation and isolation that characterize postmodern societies, and the postmodern rejection of traditional structures. But Dogtooth discusses even more: vagueness of meanings, manipulation of truth, and sexual confusion build a frustrating atmosphere with black-humored breaks.

The first and greatest postmodern aspect of the film is its criticism of the institution of family, a criticism that amounts to a rejection of the family as a grand narrative. Family values are among the most fragile, and individuals come in touch with and assimilate them at an early age. In the film, stereotypical conclusions about family roles and purposes are judged through an ironic frame of thought. In the movie the father – instead of fostering the truth – constructs a fantastic world for his family that leaves its members detached from society and naïve. The mother alters basic vocabulary by changing the meanings of words produced by a society she considers dangerous. She tells her children, for example, that “vagina” means “keyboard”.

The family members have abnormal ritualistic routines – such as defining a video cassette of themselves as a “movie” and reciting the “lines” from the “script” by heart as they watch it over and over, and saying grace to their father and mother rather than God at the dinner table.

Through their activities, then, the family members manipulate and distort meanings and knowledge that we take for granted. Corruption and lies characterize this family and its members, are their personal reality, the substance of their fragmented view of the world. The family’s integration into society is absent. The family is not open to the outside, leading its members to feel uneasy at the sight of a kitten. Characters, lost in their sense of truth, illustrating the postmodernist experience of there being no absolute truth, move in no particular place and time, blurring boundaries and unconsciously degrading the idea that one’s origin is important.

Apart from the narrative, the cinematography is also infused with postmodern remarks. In his discussion of a postmodern work by cinematographer Guy Maddin, the academic Mattias Frey refers to a “silent film look” and “place discontinuity,” terms that can be applied to Dogtooth as well. Minimalism, whiteness, emptiness and light compose a visual synthesis aimed at transmitting the concept of silence and absence. Moreover, the family’s house and the outside world are rendered discontinuous through color symbolism: The house represents plain white, while the world is industrially grey.

Dogtooth is highly ironic, too, to the point of parody. It succeeds in creating “a truly alien world just by shifting some words and usual social interactions,” according to commentary in the magazine The Crystal Ferret, and by creating situations that are not ordinary and elevate the audience’s mood at points of sheer darkness. Irony and cynicism are evident at many levels. One such level at which this is particularly striking is in the sub-plot regarding the son of the family and his father’s inspirations about how to satisfy his son’s sexual urges. While initially the father pays a woman from outside to come once a week and have sexual intercourse with the son, he later changes course, angered when the woman gives his daughter the movie Rocky, which results in the daughter boxing with, and subsequently hurting, herself. Deciding that all contacts with the outside world are dangerous, the father thus decides to use one of his daughters, his son’s sisters, to satisfy his son’s sexual urges. The irony is evident: while the father seems over-protective and autocratic, he imposes criminal perversion on his family. This particularly shocking incident confirms the words of the film theorists Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard: “Films labeled postmodern by academics and media critics embrace strong undercurrents of mayhem, irreverence and irony, revealing at the same time a milieu in which social and personal relationships often enter a process of breakdown and collapse.”

One could continue indefinitely analyzing Dogtooth from a postmodern perspective. Every shot is worth interpretation in this regard, both stylistically and theoretically. But the criticism of the grand narrative called “family,” along with ideas of fragmentation and management of meanings through language manipulation, are the ones that stand out.  

To understand the significance of the film, we need to think of its cultural context, Greece, a country that sticks strictly to traditional values, and where rituals, ceremonies and family mean so much.